After mocking the National Review Institute over something that I turned out to be completely wrong about, I thought I might pick on somebody else for a change, but for some reason the Corner is the only happenin' scene today (unless you count Ann Coulter screeching at Townhall, a site to which I'm not going to link unless I absolutely have to).

So anyway, turns out it's not just Democrats who sometimes fall totally into the other side's framing traps. Mona Charen, in the course of yet another deeply touching complaint about the poor abused GOP minority, notices that the GOP leadership agrees: "The Democrats are the party of ethics reform!" She cites the NPR account:

When the new Congress is sworn in Thursday, for the first time in 12 years, the Democrats will be in control. In addition to a historic first — Nancy Pelosi will become the first woman speaker of the House — the new Democratic majority plans to bar Republicans from offering amendments to bills the House will take up in its first 100 hours.

Republicans employed a similar tactic in their 12 years as the House majority, barring Democrats' amendments, not letting them see bills until they were to be voted on and giving them little input in committees.

But Florida Republican Adam Putnam says the situations are not similar.

"The difference is the important point here is that the American people were promised a new way of doing business in the 110th Congress," Putnam says. "There was clearly a high level of frustration in the heartland about the way people viewed the workings and procedures in this building, and they were promised a fresh approach, a fresh start."

Looks like Putnam was trying to raise expectations and set the Democrats up for a pratfall on ethics and lobbying reform. But you can't do that without first admitting that the Democrats were elected because the Republicans were unethical.